"A Brief
History of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center And the Japanese American Experience"
by Mike Mackey

On December 7, 1941, the Empire of Japan attacked United States military
installations in the Hawaiian Islands. This action brought the United States into World
War II. One result of that attack was the forced relocation of Japanese and Japanese
Americans from their homes on the West Coast of the United States. More than 14,000 of
those people would pass through the gates of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in
Wyoming.

Some federal government and U. S. military leaders claimed that the forced relocation
of people of Japanese ancestry was a "military necessity." As later
investigations revealed, this was not the case. The bombing of Pearl Harbor became the
excuse used to rid the West Coast of its Japanese residents; however, the real reason for
their removal was rooted in anti-Japanese sentiment that existed in California for forty
years before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The anti-Japanese movement in California was actually part of a larger anti-Asian
feeling that began in 1850 with the arrival of Chinese immigrants. The Chinese, like
others flocking to California at that time, were searching for gold. New racially
motivated laws that focused on the Chinese were quickly established. The Chinese were
forced to pay a "foreign miners tax" before they could search for gold and they
were added to a list of those who could not testify against white people in a court of
law, joining Blacks and Native Americans.

As the gold fever slowly died in California, the Chinese began to work as laborers for
a number of railroad companies throughout the American West. They also found jobs in the
agricultural sector. The Chinese were often willing to work for half the money paid to
white workers performing the same job. This resulted in pressure by politicians and labor
organizations on the federal government for control of the Chinese population in the
United States. These groups saw the Chinese as a threat to the American way of life. As a
result, President Chester Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act into law in 1882. This
law barred the immigration of Chinese laborers to the United States.

The Exclusion Act resulted in a decline in the Chinese population in the Unites States,
particularly in California. This population decline led to a labor shortage in that
states agricultural industry. Shortly after the Chinese started leaving in the
1880s, Japanese laborers began arriving on the West Coast from Hawaii where they had been
working in the sugar cane fields since the 1860s. The Japanese were initially welcomed as
they relieved the existing labor shortage. However, unlike the Chinese, the Japanese were
not content with merely working for others. They had a deep desire to own their own farms
and work for themselves. In a short period of time, the Japanese were also seen as a
threat.

By 1905 an anti-Japanese movement in California became active and remained so until
after the conclusion of World War II in 1945. The Japanese, however, could not be dealt
within the same manner as the Chinese. Japan was a growing economic and military power
important to the United States. To appease anti-Japanese politicians in California,
President Theodore Roosevelt reached an understanding with the Japanese government. This
understanding, termed the "Gentlemen's Agreement," halted the immigration of
laborers from Japan. The agreement did not stop the immigration of all Japanese people.

Brides of Japanese laborers, already on the West Coast before the conclusion of the
Gentlemen's Agreement, began arriving in California, causing the residents of that state
to feel betrayed by the federal government. As a result, the state legislature passed the
California Alien Land Law in 1913. This law prohibited "aliens ineligible to
citizenship" from owning land. The term "aliens ineligible to citizenship"
was the key to anti-Japanese legislation. The original naturalization laws of the United
States, dating to the 1790s, only allowed for "free white persons" to become
citizens. This was changed to include people of African descent following the Civil War.
Thus, the "Issei," or first generation Japanese immigrants, could not become
American citizens.

As the brides of Japanese laborers began to arrive and bear children, the Issei
purchased land in California in the names of their American-born offspring. The
"Nisei," or second generation, were citizens by birth. In 1920, one of
California's United States Senators, James D. Phelan, ran his election campaign on the
slogan, "Keep California White." Though Phelan lost the election, the state
legislature passed a newer version of the California Alien Land Law. The Japanese also
easily circumvented the 1920 version.

Through the early 1920s there was a national outcry for immigration control. As a
result, the federal government passed the Immigration Act of 1924. This law set quotas by
country for immigration into the United States. However, there would be no quota for
countries whose people were "ineligible to citizenship," which included the
Japanese. Immigration from Japan had been halted, but there was still the problem of how
to get rid of the Japanese already living on the West Coast.

By 1940 there were 112,000 people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast. Nearly
94,000 of them resided in California. The bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 facilitated the
removal of the vast majority of these people from California and the West Coast. Following
that attack, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) rounded up a number of Japanese,
German and Italian aliens whom it considered a possible threat to national security. On
the West Coast, General John DeWitt was picked to head the newly formed Western Defense
Command.

DeWitt had seen accusations of unpreparedness leveled against his fellow commanders in
Hawaii, and some of those officers were dismissed. He was determined that the area under
his command would not be attacked from outside the country, or from within. DeWitt
originally proposed to round up all German, Italian and Japanese aliens over the age of
thirteen and relocate them to the interior of the country. He had initially opposed the
removal of any American citizens. However, DeWitt's preoccupation with thoughts of
possible invasion and sabotage by a Japanese fifth-column left him open to other
influences, both military and civilian.

General Allen W. Gullion, the army's Provost Marshall General, saw the possibility of
sabotage at every turn. After extensive lobbying for the removal of the Japanese by the
Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, Gullion sent one of his underlings, Karl Bendetsen, for a
first hand view of the situation. Influence from Bendetsen, sensationalized newspaper
stories, and racially oriented special interest groups in California caused DeWitt to
rethink his situation. West Coast politicians were also influential. California Attorney
General Earl Warren reasoned that since no act of sabotage had been undertaken by any
individual of Japanese ancestry following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, it only meant that
Japanese people were biding their time and would attack when least expected.1

Special interest groups in California coerced DeWitt. Despite comments by General Mark
Clark, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and United States Attorney General Francis Biddle to
the effect that the removal of the Japanese from the West Coast was unnecessary, DeWitt
was swayed by other influences. Fear of the West Coast Japanese soon spread from
California to Washington D. C. As a result, on February 19, 1942, President Franklin
Roosevelt signed Executive order 9066. This order allowed civilian and military
authorities to designate restricted zones and determine what people, if any, should be
removed from those zones. Though the order mentioned no specific race or ethnic group, it
came to focus on people of Japanese descent. As a result, nearly 120,000 people of
Japanese ancestry, two thirds of who were American citizens, were forcibly removed from
the West Coast.

On March 2, 1942, General DeWitt divided the West Coast states of Washington, Oregon
and California, as well as the state of Arizona, into two specific "military
areas." These areas were split further into "prohibited" and
"restricted" zones. In these zones, which ran the length of the West Coast
shoreline, a curfew was established, but it applied only to enemy aliens and people of
Japanese descent. These military areas were further divided into 107 districts. Each
district contained approximately one thousand people of Japanese ancestry. The smaller
districts would eventually facilitate the roundup of the Japanese.

In late March and early April of 1942, the roundups began. Notices were posted in each
district. All people of Japanese ancestry were given a week to ten days to conclude any
business, lock up their homes and report to a designated location on a specified date with
no more baggage than they could carry. As a result of this order, the
"evacuees," as the government described them, usually sold what they could not
take with them. Automobiles were sold for less than half their worth; other belongings
often went for ten cents on the dollar; pets were given away or left behind. Those who
stored belongings often discovered, after the war, that those items had been stolen or
vandalized. On the specified day, evacuees appeared with their baggage, not knowing where
they were going or what would become of them, as their destinations were kept secret.

The evacuees were loaded onto trains and buses destined for what the army described as
"assembly centers." The assembly centers were established along the entire
length of America's Pacific Coast, with the greatest number located in California. In most
instances, the assembly centers were established at fairgrounds or horse racing tracks.
These facilities had water and some housing. The housing took the form of exhibit
buildings and horse stalls. The horse stalls were whitewashed, as the inmates reported,
usually right over the manure, which was splattered, on the walls. Where housing was not
available, the evacuees lived in tents or jerry-built barracks.

While the Japanese were held in the assembly centers, larger camps under the control of
the newly established War Relocation Authority (WRA), a civilian run organization, were
being constructed farther inland. Two of these camps, known as "relocation
centers," were to be built in each of the states of California, Arizona and Arkansas,
with one each being located in Idaho, Utah, Colorado and Wyoming. The camp in Wyoming,
known as the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, was to be constructed on land that was part
of a federal reclamation project located in the northwest corner of the state, halfway
between the communities of Powell and Cody.

Prior to the construction of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center, Joseph C. O'Mahoney,
Wyoming senior U. S. Senator, had contacted prominent individuals in the Powell/Cody area
and asked for their reaction to the possible construction of such a facility. Powell Mayor
Ora Bever opposed the proposed camp while Cody Mayor Paul Stock said he did not object to
the camp but did not want the Japanese allowed into his town.2 Wyoming Governor
Nels Smith made his views perfectly clear when he informed Milton Eisenhower, whom then
headed the WRA, that if the Japanese were brought into Wyoming "they would be hanging
from every tree."3 In spite of these comments, the majority of residents
in the Powell/Cody area had no opposition to the camp. They saw it as a potential relief
to the poor economic situation, which had existed in the area for the preceding fifteen
years.4

There were several reasons for choosing the site between Powell and Cody. Since the
center had to house at least 10,000 people, it would need a dependable water supply and an
economical form of transportation to keep the facility supplied with food and other
necessities. Isolation from local population centers was also a factor in choosing a
campsite. The land of the Heart Mountain Reclamation Project met all of those
requirements. The Shoshone River was nearby and would be a reliable source of water. The
Vocation railroad siding below the campsite guaranteed cheap transportation and the
location, twelve miles from Powell and thirteen miles from Cody, meant that camp residents
would be isolated from the local populations.

By early June of 1942, construction of the Heart Mountain Relocation Center was
underway. Within a matter of weeks nearly 2,000 laborers were at the site. The economic
hard times in Powell and Cody changed overnight. Government contractors hired anyone who
could swing a hammer. Housing for the future inmates consisted of a series of barrack
buildings. Each building was 120 feet long and twenty feet wide. The barrack, which could
be constructed in only fifty-five minutes if all the materials were available, was divided
into six apartments. The size of the single room apartments varied from 20 x 16 to 20 x 20
to 20 x 24 foot rooms. The larger apartments were for families of up to six members.
Furnishings for the apartments consisted of one pot-bellied stove for heat, one light
fixture hanging from the ceiling in the center of the room, and an army cot with two
blankets for each occupant.

In each block of barrack, a mess hall, latrine and showers, and a laundry area were
constructed. The contractors also built a hospital (a string of barracks tied together
with a long hallway at one end) and administration buildings. Additional barracks were
used for the school and as housing for military personnel who would guard the inmates.
When construction was completed, each building was then covered with tarpaper. In
approximately sixty days, the construction was, for the most part, completed. There were
still some buildings to finish and stoves to install, and insulation (in the form of
celotex) did not arrive until December of 1942. However, by the second week of August
1942, the Heart Mountain Relocation Center's first Director, C. E. Rachford, announced
that the camp was ready for occupation.

The first trainload of internees arrived at Heart Mountain on August 11, 1942. The
editor of the Powell Tribune said that the camp had been constructed at a
"most attractive site" in a "beautiful" area.5 The
internee's first impressions were markedly different. Ben Okura, one of the first to
arrive, said the place was "pretty spooky." The first impressions of Heart
Mountain from other internees fell somewhere into the following description: "barren,
desolate, flat open desert, bleak, scrubby, lonely, dusty and a plain of sagebrush with
not a tree in sight."6 Many of the women sat down and cried when they saw
what was to be their new home.

As with the scenery at Heart Mountain, internees were not impressed with their
apartments. Contractors used green lumber during construction. In time, as the wood dried,
it shrank and left spaces between the boards from a quarter inch to a half-inch wide. The
tar paper did not keep the dirt out. Windows were installed crooked and often would not
open or close tightly. Many internees, with tools ordered from the Sears & Roebuck
catalogue, made their own repairs. Open ceilings in each apartment restricted privacy
until celotex was installed late in the year.

The food served at Heart Mountain was described as fair to poor and there was never
enough during the early months after the camp opened. Stewards working for the
administration said the problems centered on a handful of people who complained no matter
how good the food was. Internees said the problem was in the administration, where
stewards, who had no experience feeding such large groups of people, were more concerned
that cooks fill out requisition forms correctly. Following an investigation by nine
Caucasian teachers working at the camp, the head steward was replaced and the situation in
the mess halls improved considerably.

One month after the Heart Mountain Relocation Center opened, the population reached
6,281. By the end of the first week of October 1942, more than 10,000 people were living
at the camp. Once the food and housing situations were straightened out, internees moved
to establish some semblance of a "normal" life. Adults had to find jobs to pay
for clothes and the everyday necessities of life that the government did not supply, and
the children had to be educated. There were also concerns about camp government and the
establishment of a newspaper at Heart Mountain.

Bill Hosokawa tackled the problem of establishing a camp newspaper. With a degree in
journalism and several years experience as a foreign correspondent in Southeast Asia and
China, Hosokawa became the founding editor of the Heart Mountain Sentinel. He felt
that a newspaper would give people in the camp a sense of community. It was important to
let the more than 10,000 residents know what was going on both inside the barbed wire
enclosure and in the outside world. With a circulation of 6,000, the first edition of the Sentinel
appeared on October 24, 1942, and was distributed every Saturday until the summer of 1945,
shortly before the camp closed.

A camp government was also established, but the process took time. This government
consisted of Block Chairmen and Block Managers. The chairman was to represent the
internees and present their complaints to the administration while the manager was to see
that administration policy was carried out. Historian Douglas Nelson said that community
government at Heart Mountain was a farce. Bill Hosokawa agreed, asking, "Have you
ever heard of democratic self government behind the barbed wire of a prison camp?"7
In spite of their lack of power, the administration felt that those serving in camp
government were instrumental in helping to solve problems and avoid labor strikes.

The WRA decided early on that the relocation centers were to be self sufficient, with
all the work being done by the internees. It was also decided that the internees could not
be paid more than a private in the army. While army privates were being paid $21 per
month, professional people of Japanese ancestry working at Heart Mountain were paid $19
per month. Doctor Ito, in charge of pediatrics at the Heart Mountain Hospital, was paid
$228 per year at the same time that Caucasian nurses working at the hospital were paid
$1,800 per year. Another example of the disparity in pay can be seen in the camp's
education program. Internee teachers were paid $228 per year with base salaries for
Caucasian instructors set at $2,000 per year; senior teachers were paid $2,600 annually.

This low pay scale, along with boredom and confinement to the camp, was incentive for
some at Heart Mountain to look outside for employment. As the internees began arriving at
Heart Mountain in the autumn of 1942, many local laborers had already left the area for
the service or in search of higher-paying war industry jobs outside of Wyoming. As time
for the fall harvest of beans and sugar beets approached, Wyoming and other western states
were suffering from a severe labor shortage. Many internees volunteered to work for area
farmers, but the WRA required that they be paid the prevailing wage. Farmers quickly
agreed to this stipulation, but Wyoming Governor Nels Smith did not. The governor had no
problem with the pay scale, but he wanted the State of Wyoming to have control of the
workers. The WRA refused and the internees stayed in the camp. While the crops sat in the
fields, irate farmers bombarded Smith's office with letters describing the impending
economic disaster that would take place when their crops rotted. At the last minute Smith
relented, and internees, under the control of the WRA, harvested the crops of the grateful
farmers.

On August 6, 1942, the WRA hired C. D. Carter as Superintendent of Education at Heart
Mountain, and John Corbett as high school principal. These two men were presented with the
daunting task of establishing a school system at the camp that could be accredited by the
Wyoming State Board of Education. Carter and Corbett began hiring teachers and developing
a curriculum almost immediately. Instructors had to qualify for a Wyoming teaching
certificate. The teaching certificates for the few internees who taught were stamped on
the back, "Valid at Heart Mountain Only." With the new teachers working together
to develop the curriculum, school administrators did their best to procure supplies.

The schools opened on October 5, 1942, in temporary quarters. A block of barracks was
set aside for use as classrooms. Books did not arrive until December and then only in
limited numbers. If a student had homework, he or she had to check out the textbook for
the evening. Paper and pencils were also in short supply. The chalkboard was a piece of
plywood painted black. Students sat on benches, and though some teachers had a table,
others used boxes for desks. Students who sat in the front of the classroom near the
potbellied stoves roasted, while those who sat in the back wore coats to keep from
freezing. The open ceilings made for continuous distractions as the noise from one
classroom invaded adjacent rooms. A Wyoming high school accreditation committee visiting
Heart Mountain in 1942 "did not feel that the physical facilities were on a par with
other schools of the State."8 The Wyoming State Board of Education did not
assign a rating to the Heart Mountain schools that year.

In 1943, as supplies and more textbooks began to arrive, the elementary school was
reorganized and construction began on a new high school. The new high school, completed on
May 27, 1943, had regular classrooms, a library, a large home economics room, machine
shop, wood shop and a combination auditorium/gymnasium which seated 700 for basketball
games and 1,100 for stage productions. During the 1943-44 school year, the Heart Mountain
High School began participating in interscholastic athletics.

Football was a popular high school sport and all games were played at the camp. The
Heart Mountain Eagles suffered only one defeat in football in two years. That 19-13 loss
came at the hands of the Casper Mustangs. Casper's all-state fullback, 210-pound Leroy
Pearce (the center for the Eagles weighed in at 130 pounds), scored two touchdowns in that
game. Basketball was the most popular high school sport and allowed for the closest
contact between Heart Mountain students and students from the outside. Unlike the football
team, the boys basketball team was allowed to travel to schools outside the camp, as were
the girls' basketball and volleyball teams. The basketball team was quick, but usually
gave away a distinct height advantage. The competition was fierce, however, and enjoyed by
participant and spectator alike.

The very young and the older residents of Heart Mountain who could not work or attend
school faced the biggest problem in camp--boredom. The camp activity director tried to
keep the internees occupied. There were two movie theaters in camp, the Dawn and the
Pagoda. The price for attending a movie was a nickel for children and a dime for adults.
During the time the camp was open, the movies took in more than $48,000. During the summer
months, softball and baseball were the most popular activities. In 1943, a giant pit was
dug near the irrigation canal that ran through the camp. The pit became the camp swimming
pool and was a favorite gathering place for the younger crowd. Adult activities consisted
of sewing, knitting, woodcarving and flower arranging. Traditional Japanese activities
like Kabuki theater and Bon Odori (the annual festival for the dead) were popular but
discouraged by camp administrators who insisted on previewing such activities before
permitting them to proceed.

During the winter months, judo, boxing, basketball, volleyball, badminton and weight
lifting were all popular indoor activities. More traditional Japanese activities held
indoors consisted of bonsai classes, games of goh and shogi, calligraphy and haiku. The
most popular outdoor winter activity was ice-skating. The majority of Heart Mountain's
residents had never seen an ice skate prior to coming to Wyoming. But cold weather and a
great deal of free time resulted in many internees becoming excellent skaters. The Sears
& Roebuck and Montgomery Ward mail order companies made a great deal of money selling
ice skates at Heart Mountain.

One of the most popular activities for both boys and girls was scouting. The boys,
belonging to Troop 379, 145, or 345, swam, hiked, and camped on the banks of the Shoshone
River below the relocation center. The girls also camped and hiked around Heart Mountain
and were lucky enough to make a trip to Cody and tour the Buffalo Bill Museum. For the
boys there was the Boys Scouts Drum and Bugle Corps and the girls had a drill team. The
two got together every year on the Fourth of July and paraded between the barracks. There
were also meetings and jamborees with scouts from nearby Powell and Cody. With activities
usually confined to the area around camp, the social workers at Heart Mountain felt that
restrictive life in the center was having an adverse affect on the children. The
administration arranged for the 500 scouts in the camp, male and female, to spend one week
camping and hiking in Yellowstone National Park. This plan was carried out with the scouts
going to the Park in groups of 100 during the summer of 1944.

Attending church was another important activity. The camp had a Catholic Church and a
Community Christian Church. The latter usually held joint services attended by the
Methodists, Baptists, Salvation Army, Reform Christians and Seventh Day Adventists. Two
thirds of those who attended church at Heart Mountain were Buddhists. The administration
forced the Buddhists to attend the same church even though some Buddhist priests wanted to
start separate churches of their own. Since the constitutional rights of internees had
already been violated through their forced removal from the West Coast, administrators had
no problem with ignoring their freedom of religion.

The winter months proved particularly trying for Mothers with young children. Children
had to be bundled up and taken everywhere. Since the latrine, laundry and mess hall
facilities were located in separate buildings, often several hundred yards away, a mother
would dress and undress her children many times in a day for short trips to eat and do
laundry. A child could not be left behind in the barracks for even a moment because of the
fire danger that existed. The wooden tar papered barracks with their hot coal burning
stoves could ignite and burn to the ground in a matter of minutes.

During the spring of 1943, keeping the idea of self-sufficiency in mind, camp
administrators proceeded with the development of an agricultural program. The relocation
center was located on 42,000 acres of ground belonging to the Bureau of Reclamation.
However, before any of the land could be farmed, the canal carrying irrigation water had
to be completed. Internee laborers constructed 5,000 feet of canal and used nearly 850
tons of bentonite to waterproof additional sections that had been leaking. Work was
completed in the spring of 1943. Several thousand acres of land were cleared of sagebrush
and planted in peas, beans, cabbage, carrots, cantaloupe, watermelon, and other fruits and
vegetables. In spite of the belief by local farmers that the canal could not be completed
and that crops were planted too late in the year, the autumn harvest yielded 1,065 tons of
produce which helped feed the camp's population. An additional 2,500 tons was harvested
the following year.

Though milk for Heart Mountain was supplied through contracts with the creamery in
Powell, the camp's agricultural program helped supplement meat and egg supplies by raising
cattle, hogs and chickens. In fact, egg production at Heart Mountain was so prolific that
some internees, after leaving camp, never cared if they ate another egg the rest of their
lives.

As the internees were striving to establish a normal life for themselves at Heart
Mountain, they could not forget the fact that the world was at war. Following the bombing
of Pearl Harbor, a number of Japanese Americans were discharged from various branches of
the military. Other Japanese Americans who were not serving in the armed forces were
designated 4-F, physically or mentally unfit for service, by the United States government.
That designation soon changed to 4-C, enemy aliens ineligible for service, even though the
young men and women were American citizens. By 1943, with America fighting a war on two
fronts, the War Department was in need of soldiers. Japanese Americans were then
designated 1-A and told that they were eligible to volunteer for service in a segregated,
all-Japanese unit which would serve in Europe. After being forced from their homes on the
West Coast and being told initially that they were ineligible for service, only a handful
of volunteers from Heart Mountain came forward.

By 1944 the all Nisei 442nd Regimental Combat Team had suffered heavy casualties and
was in need of replacements (at that time the 442nd was made up largely of volunteers from
Hawaii who had not been interned). In an effort to increase the number of volunteers, the
army brought Ben Kuroki, a Nisei war hero, to a number of the relocation centers,
including Heart Mountain. Kuroki's speeches about patriotic obligations to America did not
impress many of the young men in the camps. Kuroki was a Nebraska farm boy; neither he nor
his parents had spent a single day behind the barbed wire confines of a relocation center.

With few volunteers coming forward, the War Department decided to draft men right out
of the camps. In response to this move, some Heart Mountain internees established the Fair
Play Committee. This committee asserted that internees had no obligation to serve a
country that had taken away their freedom. Nearly 100 Heart Mountain draftees refused to
serve until their freedom and constitutional rights were restored. The first trial of the
Heart Mountain draft resisters was the largest mass trial in Wyoming's history. The
resisters were found guilty of refusing to serve and were sent to federal penitentiaries
in Kansas and Washington. Representing the other end of the spectrum, more than 900 men
and women from Heart Mountain did serve in both the Pacific and European theaters. Though
some were drafted or volunteered after leaving the camp, 654 went directly from Heart
Mountain into the service. Twenty were killed in action. Heart Mountain soldiers
contributed to the almost mythic legend of the 442nd, which became the most decorated unit
in the history of the United States Army.

A central concept of the relocation center was that the inmates could leave the camp,
if they located themselves and their families in areas outside the designated military
zones on the West Coast. College students were also allowed to leave the center to attend
school, if they could find an institution of higher learning willing to accept them. It
was easier for a college student to leave camp than a working person with a family. An
individual wishing to relocate first had to prove to WRA authorities that he or she had a
job waiting on the outside. That individual then filled out a mountain of paperwork, which
had to be approved by the WRA. The bureaucratic problems and the uncertain reception
waiting on the outside resulted in the majority of the internees remaining in the camps
until they closed. In addition, the older Issei who had lost their lifes work, showed little interest in starting life
over again at an advanced age.

As internees tried to develop a normal life for themselves at Heart Mountain, problems
continued for them on the outside. The city councils of Powell and Cody wanted to stop
issuing visitor passes for internees to those communities. During December 1942, Guy
Robertson replaced C. E. Rachford as director at Heart Mountain, and in the summer of 1943
he announced that he would not be responsible for upsetting the residents of Powell and
Cody. However, when harvest time arrived and Robertson refused to let laborers leave the
camp, Ora Bever, the mayor of Powell who had been behind the exclusion efforts of both
communities, changed his mind. Bever informed Guy Robertson that he only meant that the
internees could not come to town. He felt that it was all right for them to leave camp and
work in the fields. Robertson informed Bever that leaving the camp was leaving the camp.
Bever and the Powell council modified their exclusion order while Cody dropped the issue
altogether.

Once the crops were in and the area farmers placated, Bever once again moved to exclude
the internees from town. He wrote to Governor Lester Hunt stating that the people of
Powell were unanimously opposed to the Japanese coming to town. A flood of letters from
Powell merchants led Hunt to believe otherwise. A subsequent investigation carried out by
the governor's office found that ninety percent of Powell's merchants and more than
two-thirds of that community's citizens were not opposed to the issuing of visitor passes
to Heart Mountain internees. One Powell resident told an investigator, "I don't like
the Japanese, but they are American citizens and should be allowed to go wherever they
want."9

In spite of problems from outside and from within, the internees did as best they
could. Two Japanese words helped them to carry on: "shikata-nai," meaning that
things happen which are beyond one's control, and "gaman," which means to
persevere in the face of hardship. And the internees did persevere. In December of 1944,
one day before the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision in Ex Parte Endo
stating that it was illegal for the government to hold loyal American citizens in
concentration camps against their will, President Franklin Roosevelt said that the war
emergency had ended and internees could return to the West Coast beginning in January of
1945.

On the face of it, Roosevelt's decision seemed to be good news. The majority of the
internees at Heart Mountain and other camps, however, no longer had a home on the West
Coast. In spite of this fact, the WRA moved forward with plans to close all relocation
centers by the end of November 1945. Though the WRA encouraged internees to leave the camp
beginning in January of 1945, by June of that year only 2,000 people had left Heart
Mountain and its population was still nearly 7,000. Relocation back to the West Coast
consisted of giving an internee $25 and a train ticket to the destination of his or her
choice. Internees who did not supply administration officials with a home address were
simply sent to the area where they resided prior to the war, whether they had a home there
or not.

The first internees arrived at Heart Mountain on August 11, 1942. The last trainload of
people left Vocation siding below the camp at 8:00 on the evening of November 10, 1945.
During the more than three years that the Heart Mountain Relocation Center was open, it
saw the birth of 552 babies and the death of 185 internees. The center was of great
economic benefit to the state of Wyoming and more particularly to the communities of
Powell and Cody. When the camp closed, the Powell Tribune reported that, "The
Japanese were well treated here and the whole circumstance of their relocation passes off
with few disturbing memories."10

Former internees returning to California faced the problems of beginning life again.
Many of those with no place to go ended up in WRA-run trailer parks where small camp
trailers were rented for $15 per month. At Heart Mountain, the surplus equipment in the
camp was auctioned off at fire-sale prices. Former servicemen and hopeful farmers moved in
to homestead the land of the Heart Mountain Reclamation Project. Many of those farmers
benefited from the construction and waterproofing of the canal, as well as the clearing of
land in the area that had been carried out by the internees.

During the years following the end of World War II, Japanese Americans re-established
normal lives. There was little talk of the relocation experience amongst those who lived
through it. It was an experience which most former internees hoped to forget. However, the
1960s and early 1970s were witness to the Civil Rights movement, and a number of
"Sansei" (third generation Japanese Americans) began a movement for redress in
an effort to force the United States government to admit to the injustices it had
inflicted upon their parents and grandparents.

In 1976, much to the dismay of many Congressmen and Senators, President
Gerald Ford repealed Executive Order 9066. Four years later, President Jimmy Carter
assisted Japanese Americans with the issue of redress and the Commission on the Wartime
Relocation of and Internment of Civilians was created. In 1983, that Commission issued a
report titled, Personal Justice Denied, in which it stated that relocation could
not be justified under the guise of military necessity. It further found that relocation
was the result of war hysteria, race prejudice and a failure of political leadership. In
1990 the federal government issued a check for $20,000 and a signed apology from President
George Bush to all surviving former internees. The final phase of redress was the
establishment of the Civil Liberties Public Education Fund, which funded the web sitefrom
which this essay was taken. (http://chem.nwc.cc.wy.us/HMDP/history.htm)

Notes

1.

Roger Daniels, Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in World War II (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 37.